Drought has wide-ranging impacts on health, water supply, and economic sectors, especially agriculture. Hence, understanding and reducing the risk and adverse effects of drought such as yield losses is crucial.
Since 2015, South Africa is facing an exceptional water crisis, leading not only to drastic water restrictions, such as in Cape Town, but to high unemployment rates and economic losses in the agricultural sector.
In the scope of the EvIDENz, an earth-observation based information project for drought risk reduction on the national level, researchers from the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn conducted a comprehensive risk assessment as well as a processing chain analysis to assess the number of people affected by droughts.
They recently travelled to Pretoria, South Africa, to present their findings to experts. Complementary to the workshop, the EvIDENz team conducted a capacity building training targeted at practitioners.
The workshop revealed the importance of cross-sectoral information, knowledge, and data transfer and highlighted the need to systematically address drought vulnerability in drought risk management at the national level, in order to understand the complexities of drought.
Please find the full article here: https://bit.ly/2zHx8HR
UNU-EHS mandate is to carry out cutting edge research on risks and adaptation related to environmental hazards and global change. By this means, UNU-EHS is devoted to helping to build a sustainable future for Africa. Projects all across the continent seek to contribute to this goal in different ways, be it through capacity building or by analysing the causes of and ways to increase resilience towards issues such as drought, flood, or crop losses.
UNU-EHS recently launched a new interactive website on their current work in Africa. Please click here https://bit.ly/2LgtOIn and browse by topic or country.
Source: News UN Bonn, 16.07.2018